Nature has a long history
and it's been known for some time that designers and architect find
good solutions and ideas looking at nature. Nature is an inspiration
when it comes to effective use of materials, construction of housing
and other design challenges. But there is more to learn from nature.

Did you ever ask yourself
questions like: How do swarms, flogs or herds work together? How do
living organisms cooperate? How does nature grow or respond to changes?
What about leadership?

Adapted for the Club of Amsterdam Journal from a chapter in A
New Renaissance:Transforming Science, Spirit & Society,
Floris Books, London, 2010

Three major crises
- in energy,economy and climate - are now confronting us simultaneously,
globally, adding up to the greatest challenge in all human history.
They are so great, so serious, that nothing short of a fundamental
review, revisioning and revising of our entire way of life on
planet Earth is required to face this mega-challenge successfully.

This situation, unprecedented
in human history, actually makes this an amazing time of opportunity
to create the world we all deeply want!

Is that an idle dream,
an airy-fairy 'create your own reality' pitch?

Consider: We humans
created the reality we have now. It was not imposed on us by fate
or any other outside agency. While some may still claim we had
nothing to do with global warming, few would deny we have ravaged
our planet's ecosystems and loaded our air with pollutants. How
many would claim we had no choice in how to produce our energy,
or insist that Mother Nature inflicted our money system on us?
We humans dreamed up and then realized our economic systems, including
our technological path via the exploitation of nature and our
focus on consumerism and our extremes of human wealth and poverty.
We are an extremely creative species. But something has gone very
wrong; something we did not foresee, and we are having very serious
trouble understanding and facing that.

If we really look
at Nature, we see on the whole that She does not fix what isn't
broken. She is profoundly conservative when things are working
well, and radically creative when they don't. We would do well
to forget our partisan politics and mimic this approach to life's
vagaries. Recall that in Arnold Toynbee's classic study of civilizations
that failed (1946), the two critical factors proved to be the
extreme concentration of wealth and the failure to change when
change was called for (Toynbee 1946). These are the current conditions
of our global economy in a nutshell, and bigtime Change is now
called for.

There were human
cultural systems that we created such that they remained sustainable
over thousands of years, so why is our most advanced, industrial,
hi-tech super-economy, now reaching around the entire globe, proving
to be unsustainable in only a few hundred years? To see how this
could happen, we must first look at the whole issue of economics.

Economic basics

What is an economy?
I will venture to define the essence of an economy as the relationships
involved in the acquisition of raw materials, their transformation
into useful products, their distribution and use or consumption,
and the disposal and/or recycling of what is not consumed. This
definition - and this is very important to understand - is as
applicable to our human economy as to nature's ecosystemic economies,
as well as to the astonishingly complex economies operating within
our own bodies.

Earth has four billion
years of experience in economics and may well have something to
teach us. Just for starters, nature recycles everything not
consumed, which is why it has managed to create endless diversity
and resilience, with ever greater complexity, using the same set
of finite raw materials for all that time. Furthermore, with us
or without us, she is likely to continue doing so for as long
as the benevolent sun shines upon her, despite - or perhaps because
- she suffers periodic crises that drive her creativity. Let's
look at how Earth faces these crises.

As we do, note that
Earth's economy is a truly global economy, composed of many and
diverse interconnected local ecosystemic economies woven together
by global systems of air, water, climate/weather, tectonics, migrations
and, not least important, a single gene pool.

Crisis as opportunity
in nature

We are facing an
onrushing Hot Age. Around fifty-five million years ago, Earth
had its last Hot Age. In between, since the advent of humanity,
our species faced and survived at least a dozen Ice Ages. Only
since the last Ice Age have we enjoyed the long - from a human
perspective - benign, stable climate in which known human civilizations
evolved. It was possible because the last Hot Age plus an Earth-rocking
meteor, extinguished the massive reptiles and kicked off a creative
wave of mammalian evolution. Crisis for some was opportunity for
others in nature's resourceful ways.

In the much older
520-million-year-old Cambrian era Burgess Shale, found between
two peaks in the Canadian Rockies near Banff, Canada, lies fossil
testimony to one of the greatest 'opportunity' responses to crisis
in all Earth's history. Interesting that it, too, happened during
a time of warm seas and no polar ice - such as we ourselves may
be facing - occurring relatively shortly after a 'snowball Earth'
climate. In this Cambrian period before land plants and animals
appeared, marine invertebrate life reached a fully modern range
of basic anatomical variety that more than 500 million years of
subsequent evolution has not enlarged. The fossil record of this
'Cambrian Explosion' shows a radiation of animals to fill in vacant
niches, left empty as an extinction had cleared out the pre-existing
fauna. Once again, crisis for some; opportunity for others.

Let's continue deeper
yet into the past. By the Cambrian era, Earthlife had already
been through well over half its evolutionary trajectory in years.
In fact, for the first half of Earth's biological evolution -
for roughly two billion years - archaea (archebacteria) had the
whole world to themselves. They evolved amazing lifestyle diversity
in their massive proliferation from the depths of the oceans to
the highest mountain peaks and even the highest life ever reached
in the air, dramatically changing whole landscapes and shallow
seafloors as well as the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
Their impact is yet to be truly understood outside the halls of
science, although they pioneered economic situations and technologies
such as harnessing solar energy, building electric motors and
developing the first World Wide Web of information exchange we
claim as human firsts, as I will describe. (Note our unconscious
biomimicry!) My point here is that archebacteria, at the beginning
of Earthlife's evolution, were first to make extraordinary responses
to global crises - crises of their own making, we should
note, unlike the later great extinctions.

The first major such
response was to a global food shortage that occurred because the
first archebacteria, after spreading all over Earth, were eating
up all the free food - the sugars and acids chemically produced
via solar UV radiation. Their amazing response was to draw on
their own gene pool to change their metabolic pathways such that
they could harness solar energy to produce food in the process
well known to us as photosynthesis. If we could copy it at a human
scale, according to Daniel Nocera at M.I.T., it could fill all
our energy needs as long as Earth and we ourselves live. (Note
our need for biomimicry in this!)

Before photosynthesis,
bacteria had to dwell in seawater or underground, away from burning
sunlight. To function in sunlight, the new photosynthesizers were
driven to invent enzymes functioning as sunscreens to protect
themselves as they lived off the sun's rays and the plentiful
minerals and water available to them. Unfortunately, while they
did extremely well, they inadvertently created the next big global
crisis of atmospheric pollution, leading to the next notable example
of taking crisis as opportunity.

Like today's plants
that inherited their lifestyle, the photosynthesizing archebacteria
gave off oxygen as their waste gas. There were, as yet, no oxygen-needy
creatures, so the highly corrosive oxygen, after as much of it
as possible was absorbed by seas and rocks and soil reddened by
its rusting effects, piled up in the atmosphere in highly significant
and dangerous quantities. Along with its direct dangers of killing
corrosion, this pollution created the ozone layer which caused
further diminution of the old sugar and acid food supply requiring
the free passage of UV through the atmosphere.

Once again, life
responded with a stunning new lifestyle invention - a whole new
way of living using oxygen itself to smash food molecules in the
most hi-tech biological lifestyle thus far invented - the one
we ourselves inherited from them and call 'breathing'. Bacteria
that breathed in oxygen gave off the carbon dioxide needed by
the photosynthesizers, thereby completing a give and take exchange
in which their plant and animal heirs, including us, still engage.

Life has a dynamic
way of oscillating between problems and solutions, which seems
to keep evolution happening. The 'breathers' needed food molecules
to smash while food was becoming scarcer. Solution: they invented
electric motors built into their cell membranes, vastly more efficient
than human-designed motors up to the present, attaching flagella
to them as propellers. These hi-tech breathers drilled their way
into big sluggish fermenting bacteria, which I have called 'bubblers'.
(Sahtouris 2000). This initiated the era of bacterial colonialism
in which the breathers invaded the bubblers for their 'raw material'
molecules. Reproducing by division within the bubblers, they literally
occupied them as they exploited and drained away their resources,
leaving them weakened or dead. (Is human colonialism biomimicry?)

In this primeval
Earth world, we can imagine the many conflicts over scarce food
and overcrowding that wreaked havoc, yet simultaneously drove
innovation. Eventually, in their encounters with each other, archebacteria
somehow discovered the advantages of cooperation over competition:
that feeding your enemy is more energy efficient (read: less costly)
than killing them off.

Read that last sentence
again, because it is the most important discovery any maturing
species can make and is very much on our human agenda right now!

All along, in evolving
different lifestyles, the archaea had been able to freely trade
DNA genes with each other across all the different types in a
great World Wide Web of information exchange in which any bacterium
had access to the DNA information of any other. Thus they refined
a myriad particular cell shapes and lifestyles or roles, such
as fixing nitrogen or moving by whiplash propulsion or living
in mats of millions.

The crowning glory
of all their achievements was the evolution of gigantic collectives
with highly sophisticated divisions of labour that became the
only other type of cell ever to grace the evolutionary scene:
the nucleated cells of which we ourselves are composed. This may
have begun, as microbiologist Lynn Margulis and others worked
it out, when invading breathers felt their bubbler host weakening
and took on some 'bluegreens' (photosynthesizers) to make food
for the entire colony. The breathers' motors provided transportation
by working in unison on the bubbler's cell membrane to drive the
colony into sunlight where the bluegreens could work as needed
(Margulis 1998).

In such cooperatives,
apparently each specialized bacterium donated the DNA it did not
need to fulfil its special function into a common gene library
that became the new cell's nucleus. To this day our cells and
those of plants, animals and fungi, contain the descendants of
these archebacteria in the form of mitochondria (breathers) and
chloroplasts (bluegreens).

Nucleated cells went
through another billion years repeating the cycle of youthful
competition and creativity to mature cooperation in the form of
multi-celled creatures. That was the last great leap in evolution
- around one billion years ago, bringing us closer to that Cambrian
era, when this evolutionary model really took off as described
earlier. Ever since, multi-celled creature have been competing
when youthful and cooperating when mature.

Maturation through
crisis

In my view as an
evolution biologist, then, the essential pattern in evolution
for all species from time immemorial is this very maturation curve
from competitive, expansive, youthful economies to cooperative,
stable, mature economies. One can see this in what ecologists
classify as Type I Pioneer ecosystems and Type III Climax ecosystems
today, as well as in looking back over Earth's four billion year
history of species' econoomies.

Some species never
make it to maturity. Much of humanity did-but only at the tribal
level to which countless human groups matured in cooperation internally
and with neighboring tribes, sometimes developing complex economies
with large towns and many artifacts, as found at Catal Huyuk in
Turkey and many other locations in Africa, Asia, North and South
America. Mature cooperation, with other humans as well as with
large animals no doubt played a large role in surviving a dozen
Ice Ages as humanity did.

In the past 6,000
years or so, we built civilizations-relatively huge socio-economic
political systems with complex infrastructures that were mostly
internally cooperative despite occasional insurrections. But these
mature cooperatives, like the nucleated cell and like the multi-celled
creature before them, were new cooperative entities at yet another
size scale, and therefore proceeded naturally in the youthful
mode of expansionism in competition. Lo, the Age of Empires that
shifted over time into national and then corporate empires, had
begun!

And so human empires
mimic rather well the expansive, competitive phase of juvenile
species in nature from the original archaea (bacteria) to the
grasses that evolved along with humans and are also still in that
juvenile take-over, make-over whatever you can to stay in the
game mode Darwin described so well. Interesting that humans and
those youthful grasses - in the version humans call 'grain' or
'corn' - have come to depend on each other.

Yes, Darwinian evolution
describes the juvenile phase, and that is precisely why the entrepreneurs
of our Industrial Age loved that theory as much as the Soviet
Union loved Kropotkin's version of evolution, titled Mutual
Aid, all about the cooperative phases of species evolution,
which rationalized collectivism. In the first, community was sacrificed
to the individual's interest; in the latter the individual's interest
was acrificed to that of the collective. Two half theories that
make a whole when put together and make the connections between
the ecologists' different types of ecosystems. The learning curve
of maturation ties it all together in an elegant whole.

The recognition that
our current way of life is unsustainable (literally implying we
must live differently) is a new and vital insight, without which
we could not see any need to change the way we live on what seemed
like a limitlessly provident planet, now so obviously ravaged
by our youthful empire building to a critical point, if not already
beyond it.

All our technology
has come through biomimicry-from spinning like silkworms and weaving
like spiders, building like termites and tunneling like moles,
flying like birds and computing like brains, to using radar like
bats and sonar like dolphins, and so on and on. But now it is
time for the biggest and evolutionarily greatest biomimicry feat
of all: copying those of our ancestors who made it to mature sustainability,
pulling back on our economic expansion just as our bodies did
when reaching mature size and shifting to maintaining stable sustainability.

Looking at our recent
history, we see many experiments in cooperation pushing us to
our truly global cooperative maturity: from the United States
of America to the European Union, from NATO and SEATO and other
alliances to World Parliaments of Religion, a World Court and
International Space Stations, from VISA cards crossing cultures
and currencies to International Air Traffic Control, and so on
and on.

The Internet is the
largest self-organizing living system created by humanity and
is changing everything. The top-down hierarchies that worked to
maintain and expand empires are giving way to democratic and even
more mature living systems ways of organizing and governing ourselves;
even the gifting economies arising all over it, as well as in
local communities, biomimic mature species economics.

If there is one biological
system that can give us the clues in an up close and personal
model available to us all, it is our own bodies. There is no more
amazing or mature economy to mimic as we design our own future
than the bodies in which each and every one of us, regardless
of political persuasion, is walking around-bodies in which no
organ either exploits the rest for its own benefit or interferes
with diversity by trying to make the others more like itself.

Each of your up to
one hundred trillion cells has some thirty thousand recycling
centres in it just to keep all those proteins you are made of
healthy. Each of those is as sophisticated as a chipper machine
would be if you could stick a dead or damaged tree into one and
get a healthy live tree out the other end instead of a pike of
chips! And they exist along with a thousand mitochondrial banks
in each cell, giving out free ATP stored-value debit cards 24/7
with no interest, not even pay-back of what you spent-a currency
system we could well biomimic as soon as possible in place of
our wealth-concentrating debt money.

It has become clear
to me that the mature cooperative phase of species is often driven
into existence by crises and I am happy to note how the vast majority
of humans becomes highly cooperative in times of disaster, surviving
predations of the very few to create wellbeing for the many. It
is in our genes, our blood and bones, to cooperate. We have been
through this before, just never before at a global size level.

Species that become
sustainable - that survive a really long time - get to their mature
collaborative phase while others, stuck in adolescent behaviours
that no longer serve them, die out. Humanity now stands on the
brink of maturity in the midst of disasters of our own making.
Let us take heart from our most ancient Earth ancestors, the archea-
the only other creatures of the living Earth to create global
disasters through their own behaviour and solve them. Let us see
if we can do as well as they did! Let a mature and cooperative
global economy be our goal and let us make it as successful, as
efficient and resilient, as our own highly evolved bodies.

The global economy
we built as a resource-rapacious, competitive monopoly game based
on debt money and powered by fossil fuels was a necessary youthful
phase. We are ready now to leap into maturity. We the people can
declare our solidarity with each other around the globe, stop
making war on each other, roll up our sleeves, and do the positive
work needed to develop clean energy sources, move coastal cities
uphill, reinvent money, green deserts, and cooperate in all our
cultural and religious diversity to build a world that works for
all, whether or not our governments follow our lead.

As Rumi asked: Why
do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?

Elisabet Sahtouris
PhD (www.sahtouris.com)
is an internationally known evolution biologist, futurist, author
and speaker living in Spain. With a post-doctoral degree at the
American Museum of Natural History, she taught at MIT and the
University of Massachusetts, contributed to the NOVA-Horizon TV
series, is a fellow of the World Business Academy, and a member
of the World Wisdom Council. Her venues include the World Bank,
UN, Boeing, Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, South African Rand Bank,
Caux Round Table, Tokyo International Forum, the governments of
Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands, Sao Paulo business
schools and State of the World Forums. Author of EarthDance:
Living Systems in Evolution; A Walk Through Time: From Stardust
to Us; and Biology Revisioned with Willis Harman

In the meeting of February 23, 2012 we would like to address some
of the issues of social Biomimicry. We will present some common
patterns from nature that are inspirational for social issues
like: communication, teamwork, leadership, development of organisations
and society. We will give an idea of how to translate these patterns
to work situation, architecture of organisations, teamwork and
future growth. Social Biomimicry gives a fresh new perspective
and we also belief it will contribute to resilient and future-orientated
organisations.

Meet our team:Bowine
Wijffels
is working as consultant and process leader in environmental
education and learning for sustainable development. Learning
from nature of one of her passions. Social Biomimicry - for project management, leadership, change
in organisationsDouwe
Jan Joustra,
Program Manager and Consultancy, One Planet Architecture instituteSocial Biomimicry and city planning - city as living system,
spatial planningand our moderator Caroline
van Leenders.
She works at Agentschap NL. Her focus point is how to create
change in large scale governmental programs.

The European Commission has, in the last years, financed an innovative
research project on cognition and sense of touch and their link
to the development of intelligence. This project, taken in charge
by the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genoa led to the
creation of ICub, a humanoid robot, of the size of a three and
a half years old child, to which the human skin could become a
reality.

ICub is covered in triangular and flexible printed circuit, each
containing twelve capacitive captors, which in turn have been
covered with silicon pellicle and Lycra. Each triangle is also
composed of twelve "tactile pixels" which enable the
robot to experience and recognize the sensations which occur when
a pressure is exercised on its envelop or "skin". This
humanoid baby has enabled great progress in the development of
an artificial skin with similar characteristics to the human one
that could be of great use for the future. Indeed, the important
research investments and progress made in robot research will
benefit greatly of such advancement for the abstract concept of
skin for robots could become a reality. Potentially covered with
an artificial skin based on the same principle and characteristics
as the one developed and tested on ICub, humanoids could at last
experience the sense of touch. The concept of a skin is still
non-existent for robots but, becoming an "artificial reality"
it would improve their abilities and possibilities of successful
interaction with human beings.

Thus, in May 2012, the researchers of the ITT of Genoa will be
sending to a selected number of laboratories in Europe the first
components of a type of artificial skin, designed with ICub baby
humanoid robot.

Cheese to fuel batteries
Greek researchers, working on new sources for renewable energies,
have come up with an interesting innovation in "fuelling"
combustible batteries with wastes of the cheese industry. The
cheese industry in a number of countries, such as Greece or
France, rejects up to 70% of whey depending on the type of cheese
produced. This industrial waste is toxic for the environment
because of its organic content but could be used as a source
of energy for combustible batteries for it is rich in lactose
and sugar. Indeed, creating batteries with microbic crops within
them could enable the production of electricity because of their
consumption of whey, very rich in lactose and sugar which would
stand here as sources of energy.

Traditional batteries produce electricity by using a catalytic
material which oxides a combustible, such as hydrogen, and creates
an electric current between two electrodes. Biobatteries function
according to the same principle but the catalytic reaction is
here created by bacteria which, by the absence of oxygen and
chemical reactions consequent to the consumption of raw material
such as whey, produce electricity.

These biobatteries could be applied in principle to many more
industries, such as the pig breeding industry and the transformation
of food industry, thus solving their waste issue in an innovative
way. Nevertheless, it has been noted that refined combustibles
would be more efficient than raw material such as sugar and
lactose in the production of electricity with biobatteries.
What's more, these batteries for now can produce only a few
milliwatts which is barely sufficient to charge a mobile phone.
The lack of investment for research in this domain remains the
biggest obstacle to the work of researchers wanting to improve
the productivity of these batteries and eventually set them
on the market.

Mutitoe is a research project by the Human Computer Interaction
Lab of Prof. Patrick Baudisch at Hasso Plattner Institute in Germany.

"Tabletop computers cannot become larger than arms
length without giving up direct touch. This prevents tabletop
applications from dealing with more than a few dozen on-screen
objects. We propose direct touch surfaces that are orders of magnitude
larger by integrating high-resolution multi-touch into back-projected
floors, while maintaining the purpose and interaction concepts
of tabletop, i.e., direct manipulation.

We based our design
on frustrated total internal reflection because its ability to
sense pressure allows the device to see users soles when
applied to a floor. We demonstrate how this allows us to recognize
foot postures and to identify users. These two functions form
the basis of our system. They allow the floor to ignore inactive
users, identify and track users based on their shoes, enable high-precision
interaction, invoke menus, as well as track heads and allow users
to control several multiple degrees of freedom by balancing their
feet."

"Cocoon_FS is
a brilliant and bizarre-looking lightweight modular building inspired
by marine phytoplankton and pioneered by Pohl Architects in cooperation
with PlanktonTech. A high strength to weight ratio, translucent
shell, and low material usage make this eye-catching prefab fantastically
easy to transport." - Inhabitat

If chaos theory transformed
our view of the universe, biomimicry is transforming our life
on Earth. Biomimicry is innovation inspired by nature  taking
advantage of evolutions 3.8 billion years of R&D since
the first bacteria. Biomimics study natures best ideas:
photosynthesis, brain power, and shells  and adapt them
for human use. They are revolutionising how we invent, compute,
heal ourselves, harness energy, repair the environment, and feed
the world.

Science writer and
lecturer Janine Benyus names and explains this phenomenon. She
takes us into the lab and out in the field with cutting-edge researchers
as they stir vats of proteins to unleash their computing power;
analyse how electrons zipping around a leaf cell convert sunlight
into fuel in trillionths of a second; discover miracle drugs by
watching what chimps eat when theyre sick; study the hardy
prairie as a model for low-maintenance agriculture; and more.

.Rich
with Youtube

byRaphaelle Beguinel,
Assistant Editor, Club of Amsterdam Journal

Youtube no longer
appears to be just an interactive platform where users share videos,
inform and entertain themselves. Founded in 2005 by three former
PayPal engineers, the company has grown into one of the biggest
websites and platforms on the Internet with the opportunity for
users to earn money by sharing popular videos. Indeed, a number
of users, especially families, have been earning a lot of money
just by sharing videos of their children or funny daily-life episodes
on-line. When the video appears to be popular enough, that is
viewed by a significant number of Youtube users, the company contacts
the family or individual having posted the video to establish
a lucrative partnership. With such a partnership the advertising
revenue from the ads showed before viewing the video will be split
between Youtube and the user having posted the popular video on
the website. What's more, a set amount of money will be given
to the "poster" by the company every time the video
will hit, for example, an additional thousand views. As an example,
a teenager named Jamie posted a video featuring his brother crying
over having to stop playing a computer game. The video being viewed
by more and more Youtube users, Jamie was contacted by the company
and a partnership was established. The contract established that
for this video Jamie would now receive 69 euros for each additional
thousand views. Youtube even enabled Jamie to create his own Youtube
channel to post videos about his brother and be able to post more
videos on a regular basis.

A growing number of individuals and families have thus been able
to earn a lot of money just by posting videos with an important
"popularity potential" and turn Youtube into a more
or less regular source of revenue. Mr. Davies-Carr, having made
a first Youtube buzz with a popular video named "Charlie
bit me!" featuring his two sons, also created his own Youtube
channel and posts videos of his daily family life every six weeks
with each of them obtaining several millions of hits. Mr Davies-Carr,
with this Youtube money, was able to pay for his children's school
fees and invest in better material for his videos.

Many other video success stories can be taken as examples to illustrate
these Youtube partnerships between the company and the posters.
For example, the video "baby shakira" topped all previsions
attaining more than 24 million views; and quite a few other videos,
close to the "Charlie bit me" concept, have totalized
several million views such as "Aydan's funny laugh"
(5 million views).

The company recently announced having developed an algorithm enabling
the company to detect up-and-coming videos by determining their
"popularity potential". This algorithm will enable Youtube
to contact and establish advantageous contracts with the authors
of these promising videos as fast as possible and prevent any
competition from other video channels such as Daily Motion or
Video BB. On the user's side, there are several conditions for
his video to become popular enough and interest Youtube enough
for the channel to propose a partnership. First, the essential
condition is that the video needs to be viewed by at least several
millions of users and needs to be viewed more and more to attract
the channel's attention. Once Youtube has contacted the author
of the popular video two conditions need to be continuously fulfilled:
that the video keeps becoming more and more popular with a significant
amount of additional views every day, month or week; and that
the author keeps on posting more videos with the same popularity
potential.

This Youtube innovation reveals an important trend where Internet
users become increasingly active on the web. They are no longer
interested only in sharing, entertainment or information consulting
but also in the opportunities of investing and taking advantage
financially of such a system. Nevertheless it is important to
note that even if such partnerships are growing in proportion
they still remain an infinite minority of users which ensures
a lucrative deal for Youtube. Indeed, it will become more and
more difficult for a user to attract the channel's attention for
the competition is becoming fiercer with more and more users adding
more and more videos by the day. aydan's funny laugh - he's a happy baby! best baby laugh!

baby shakira

.Michael
Gazzaniga - The Interpreter

Michael
Gazzaniga
is a Professor of Psychology and the Director for the SAGE Center
for the Study of Mind at the University of California Santa Barbara.
He oversees an extensive and broad research program investigating
how the brain enables the mind. Over the course of several decades,
a major focus of his research has been an extensive study of patients
that have undergone split-brain surgery that have revealed lateralization
of functions across the cerebral hemispheres.

The Interpreter

The third in a series
of Gifford Lectures by Professor Michael Gazzaniga. Recorded 15
October, 2009 at the Playfair Library Hall, the University of Edinburgh.

The interpreter is the
device we humans enjoy that provides us with the capacity to see
the meanings behind patterns of our emotions, behavior and thoughts.

This concept is central
to understanding the relationship between our brain and our strong
sense of self.

In a way, it is the
device that liberates us from our automatic ways spelled out in
Lecture 1 and 2.

The interpreter constructs
the sense that there is a me arising out of the ongoing neuronal
chatter in the brain and making all of lifes moment-to-moment
decisions.

Our compelling sense
of being a unified self armed with volition, deployable attention
and self-control is the handiwork of the interpreter, for it brings
coherence to a brain that is actually a vastly parallel and distributed
system.

This view stands
in contrast to much neuroscientific theorizing or existential
musing about our unified, coherent nature.

In most models of
brain and cognitive mechanism, one can identify, as Marvin Minsky
once said, the box that makes all the decisions.

.Futurist
Portrait: Sheryl Connelly

Sheryl Connelly, manager of Ford Global Trends and Futuring

"Scenario planning
isn't about predicting the future. You really need to be careful
about that."

Sheryl Connelly currently
stands as a major reference in the field of scenario planning
and futurism thanks to her unique approach to innovation and her
established expertise in business, marketing and trend forecasting.
Former graduate from the Michigan State University, where she
obtained a bachelor in finance, Connelly then graduated from the
University of Detroit-Mercy in law and business administration
at a master's degree level. She exercised shortly as an attorney
before entering Ford Company at the Marketing and Sales' company
division. She entered the Global trend and Futuring division of
the company seven years ago as manager.

Throughout the years, Sheryl Connelly has managed to use her knowledge
and experience in an unconventional way, representative of her
professional career, becoming an expert in studying, analyzing
and predicting future trends that might impact the Ford products.
Using her high abilities in communication, business and marketing
expertise, academic and empirical knowledge, and trans-field vision,
Connelly, as an example, studied and anticipated the now established
consumer tendency of rising carefulness in purchase and the growth
of incremental purchases. The analysis of consumer behavior and
global trends is at the heart of Sheryl Connelly's work at Ford's
Global Trend and Futuring division for it has proven highly valuable
for research and development, innovation and marketing activities
in a world ever more uncertain and unpredictable.

In addition to her work as manager at Ford's Global Trend and
Futuring, Connelly is a sought-after speaker, having participated
to numerous talk-shows, professional gatherings and association
meetings such as the TedX Talks (2011), the American Marketing
Association's Marketing Research Conference (2009), the OMMA (Online
Media, Marketing and Advertising) Global conference in 2011. Trend
forecaster, futurist and speaker, Sheryl Connelly is also a licensed
attorney and an artist.

Innovate: Uncertainty

.Agenda

Season
Events 2011/2012

NEXT
Event:February
23, 2012the
future of Social Biomimicry
What we can learn from natureFebruary 23,
2012, 18:30-21:15Location:
Volkskrantgebouw, Wibautstraat 150, 1091 GR Amsterdam
[former building of the Volkskrant]Supported
by Agentschap NL